]]>The moonwalker lives in a pale-blue house at the end of a long driveway. Its defining feature is a steeply pitched entryway roof that points unambiguously to the heavens.

I ask several employees at the CVS a couple of blocks from the house if they know Edgar Mitchell. Not a blink of recognition, except for a 20-something girl in the pharmacy department. “Oh, sure — I think that’s a dress shop up the way,” she says.

Imagine that. Edgar Mitchell — the sixth human to walk on the surface of the moon, once widely feted by grateful heads of state for his historic achievement — is now a nearly anonymous 84-year-old with three dogs, a Toyota SUV, and a part-time assistant. He lives on five unmanicured acres in a South Florida suburb.

For the most part, he seems OK with being an ordinary old Earthling, his spaceman days long past. Test pilots tend to be both fatalistic and realistic in that way. As we sit across from each other in his living room, he sums up his extraordinary NASA career in three words: “I was competent.” A moment later, speaking of his Apollo 14 moon lander named Antares, he adds, “I had a good machine.”

Mitchell’s moment in the moonlight, if you will, occurred 44 years ago. He and fellow astronaut Alan Shepard landed in the Fra Mauro region, where they spent 33 hours conducting scientific experiments (and clowning around a bit on camera). Mitchell still holds the record for the longest walk on the moon. He doesn’t boast about it, but he’s hung a document that certifies the trek.

It is in the modern-day DNA of America to manufacture heroes, to nourish them and genuflect before them. That was somewhat less true on the afternoon of January 31, 1971, when Mitchell, strapped into a cramped command module atop 960,000 gallons of rocket fuel, blasted off before a worldwide TV audience. Our cultural perspective has since shifted. Today, we call first responders our national heroes; LeBron James is a hero to millions of kids; hell, even the Congressional Sergeant at Arms may be a heroic figure to ambitious, first-year security officers everywhere. But their enduring light will be but a flicker compared to Ed Mitchell’s death-defying achievement. Mitchell is one of only eight living men in the entire arc of human civilization to have visited our satellite moon — the moon! His feat is literally otherworldly.

Mitchell sums up his extraordinary NASA career in three words: “I was competent.”

And yet the brain-bending truth is that these days Mitchell is just another suspenders-wearing retiree who has gently touched down in the Florida sunshine. He meditates every morning, sometimes listens to honky-tonk music, plays sudoku “with pleasure,” and, he insists, seldom contemplates the moon.

Visitors, such as me, will sometimes get a tour of what he calls “the museum” — that is, the entirety of his home — which is bursting with astronaut memorabilia. So, while Mitchell insists he never stares at the moon, he doesn’t need to. It stares back at him from every inch of his pad. The most remarkable artifact of all is nearly lost among the clutter of his office: the actual control stick from the Antares lander, wires sprouting from its bottom.

When Mitchell left NASA in 1972, he was awarded a standard pension. Hardly enough money to live on. It’s not widely known, but astronauts receive no special compensation for their risk-taking. Demeaning though it was, Mitchell briefly accepted a job at the National Enquirer, which required chiefly that he introduce its owner to a succession of psychics, whom he knew because of his interest in parapsychology. It was a mistake, he admits. “But I had to make a living.” Again, imagine that.

In the years since, Mitchell has consulted on several documentaries and Hollywood films (Apollo 13, for example, which in real life he helped rescue from disaster). On others’ recommendations, he watched bits of the hit 2013 movie Gravity. “Not impressed,” he says to me, twice.

It pleases him that nowadays he is known for something other than bounding along on moon dust. He is among the high priests of quantum physics and is the founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which explores the nature of consciousness. If you’re willing to pay, he’ll join you in a Skype conversation on these topics. “I’m a cosmologist, looking for the answers to the deep questions about our planet,” he says. “Returning from the moon, seeing the heavens from that perspective, I had a sense of wonder and joy and beauty.”

The moonwalker down the road, who neither seeks nor receives much hero worship, is concerned about the future of our planet. “We are consuming at an alarming rate,” Edgar Mitchell tells me. “We won’t endure another hundred years,” And so? “We have to get some of our people to go elsewhere. Mars.”

—
Edgar Mitchell passed away at age 85 on February 4, 2016, one day before the 45th anniversary of his moon landing.

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2015/03/09/in-the-magazine/people-and-places/moon-man-street.html/feed1Post Week in Review: September 21–September 27http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/09/26/post-week-in-review/post-week-in-review-september-21-september-27.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/09/26/post-week-in-review/post-week-in-review-september-21-september-27.html#respondWed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=102242Subplots to a popular series get lost in syndication, the red planet has a visitor, and director Steven Soderbergh teaches film students a lesson in black and white

September 22 marked the 20th anniversary of Friends, the NBC sitcom about six 20-somethings addicted to caffeine. This milestone might make some of us feel old. But should it? It’s only the 10th anniversary of when the show ended, so the 20th doesn’t really seem like a “wow, I’m old” moment.

Here’s an interesting piece of info about Friends: If you didn’t see the episodes when they originally aired on NBC or watch the uncut episodes on DVD or online, you’ve probably never seen an entire episode. I sat and watched several episodes on DVD last year and it’s amazing how much is cut out of the shows when they air in syndication on networks like Nick at Nite — not just lines, but sometimes entire scenes and subplots.

It’s interesting how many other classic shows started on September 22. Lost, The West Wing, Sports Night, Family Ties, ER, The Good Wife, and Two and a Half Men, along with many others. OK, maybe Two and a Half Men isn’t a “classic” in the purest sense of the word.

SiriusXM Might Be in Serious Trouble

The outcome of Flo & Eddie Inc. v. Sirius XM Radio Inc., et al could influence how music aggregates do business. (Antonio Gravante/Shutterstock)

The satellite radio company lost what could turn out to be a precedent-setting case this week.

U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez granted a summary judgment in favor of Flo & Eddie, the comedic musical duo made up of Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, founding members of the Turtles. It’s a complex case that deals with sound recordings made before 1972; music that SiriusXM has been playing without paying royalties or getting permission. The judge had to interpret a 1982 statute and decided that the law “infers that the legislature did not intend to further limit ownership rights.”

Flo & Eddie are seeking $100 million (say it in Mike Myers’ Dr. Evil voice). This could change not only the way SiriusXM does business but also many music websites.

Bendy iPhones

I’m not an expert on modern technology, but smart phones aren’t supposed to bend, are they? That’s what’s happening to the new iPhone 6 Plus from Apple. People are finding that the phones are so thin that they are bending if you sit down with the phone in your pocket. Now, there are two solutions. One is to carry it in your jacket, like I do, and another is to not sit down with an iPhone in your pocket. But is this really how we should look at this problem? I think it’s a reasonable request that an expensive piece of modern technology shouldn’t bend like this, isn’t it?

What Would Raiders of the Lost Ark Look Like in Black and White?

Steven Soderbergh (pictured) stripped Raiders of the Lost Ark of all sound and color to teach film students a lesson in staging. (Andrea Raffin/Shutterstock)

Whenever a network or studio colorizes a classic black-and-white film, there’s always a bit of controversy. But what about changing a classic color film black and white? I’ve been doing this for years. I’ll adjust the color on my TV to watch a movie in black and white just to see if it will somehow make the movie better, maybe give it more gravitas—sort of how playing an acoustic version of a really bad electronic rock song makes you look at it in a different way.

This is what director Steven Soderbergh did with Steven Spielberg-directed Raiders of the Lost Ark. He also took out John Williams’ music and replaced it with moody themes from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Here’s the result.

I wonder what people who have never seen Raiders of the Lost Ark (there must be some of you out there) think of the movie if this is their introduction to it and then they watch the original?

National Punctuation Day

Wednesday was the day, we, “celebrated” National Punctuation Day? That’s the. day when we all remember! to! put! periods and exclamation points and commas – in the right (place). .. ,,

First Day of Fall

Fall Horseback RideJohn ClymerOctober 20, 1956

There are a lot of people who will say the nice weather in summer is their favorite, but I’ll take fall any day (I don’t know how heat and humidity can be considered nice). So us autumn-lovers were happy that the season kicked in on Tuesday. Now the days are getting shorter and the leaves are changing. Soon I’ll have to wear a coat, and I couldn’t be happier.

Hey, It’s National Pancake Day

Pumpkin Pancakes

Fall also means it’s pumpkin season. I know, I know, you’re sick of pumpkin flavored everything, right? Coffee, cakes, doughnuts, beer, Oreos. I think I took some pumpkin-flavored Advil the other night. But to celebrate National Pancake Day today, here’s a recipe for Pumpkin Pancakes that sounds delicious.

You can’t get anymore fall than something that combines pumpkin and toasty pancakes.

Upcoming Anniversaries

Saturday Night Football Debut (1951). Duke and University of Pittsburgh play the first live sporting event seen coast to coast on NBC.

September 30

Hydropower Is Here (1882). Thomas Edison opens his first commercial hydroelectric power plant on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin.

October 1

Strike Up the Band (1880). John Philip Sousa becomes leader of the United States Marine Band. Eight years later he will write the official march of the US Marine Corps, Semper Fidelis.

October 2

Comic Triple Begins (1890). The last third of the American comedic trio the Marx Brothers, Groucho, enters the world. In 1954, his son Arthur Marx would write an eight-part series, “My Old Man Groucho,” for the Post.

October 3

Nevermore (1849). American author and Post contributor Edgar Allan Poe is found delirious in a gutter in Baltimore, Maryland; the last time he’s seen in public before his death. Read Poe’s spine-tingling story “The Black Cat,” published in the Post in 1843.

October 4

Sputnik Blasts Off (1957). Russia launches a satellite — the first man-made object ever to leave the Earth’s atmosphere — into space.

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/09/26/post-week-in-review/post-week-in-review-september-21-september-27.html/feed0Post Week in Review: September 14–September 20http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/09/19/post-week-in-review/post-week-in-review-september-14-september-20.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/09/19/post-week-in-review/post-week-in-review-september-14-september-20.html#respondWed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=101746NASA says there'll be no more hitchhiking through the galaxy, adults get a talking to, and Alex Trebek's mustache speaks up

Space shuttle Atlantis lifts off into space, heading for the International Space Station, on the last mission and last flight of the U.S. Space Shuttle Fleet (STS-135) on July 8, 2011. (Tom Fawls/Shutterstock)

If you’re of a certain age, you remember when space exploration was exciting. The days of Gemini and Apollo projects and space shuttle launches. Then we saw NASA get rid of the space shuttle program altogether in 2011 and scale back plans for Mars in 2012. Sure, once in a while we’ll hear news of a satellite beaming back info from the edges of the galaxy or see some great pictures from a Mars rover expedition, but it’s been rather boring lately, especially when it comes to manned missions. America has even had to hitch rides with Russia to the International Space Station.

But no more! This week, NASA announced that they are spending $6.8 billion on contracts with Boeing Co. and Space Exploration Technology Corp. to build “space taxis” that will transport U.S. astronauts to the station starting in 2017. (It’s not men putting their feet on Mars, but it’s something.)

I wonder why they didn’t ask Uber?

Are You an Adult?

Every week there seems to be one article that everyone wants to talk about, one that gets a lot of readers commenting and social media buzzing. For the past week it has been A.O. Scott’s New York Times essay called “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture”. Basically he argues that TV characters like Mad Men’sDon Draper, The Sopranos’ Tony Soprano, and Breaking Bad’s Walter White are “the last of the patriarchs” and that “in doing away with patriarchal authority, we have also, perhaps unwittingly, killed off all the grown-ups.”

I don’t want to get into a whole discussion of patriarchal authority or sexism or to compare the roles of men and women today to the past, but I will say this: It is rather odd how adults — and it’s often men — hold on to their childhood/teen years longer than men used to. They play video games and wear baseball caps and — most distressingly — call each other “dude” a lot. No one over the age of 35 should call someone else “dude,” especially if that someone is a woman.

But I’m more concerned that Scott is taking the opening credits to Mad Men literally, believing that at the end of the series Don is going to fall off of a building and die. Well, let’s look at it logically. Let’s say we take the opening literally. OK. At the end of the opening, after Don falls off the building, we see him alive and sitting on a couch, smoking a cigarette. So, if we take the opening literally, Don lives!

Print News vs. Online News: Which Do Readers Recall Better?

I’m a big fan of print. Sure, I love the Web and I think e-books are a terrific, handy innovation, but I think it would be a weird and very different world if 100 percent of print newspapers, magazines, and books were replaced by digital versions. I don’t see this happening in my lifetime, or even the lifetime of any kids who are reading this (are any kids reading this?), but it will probably happen one day. Most publications will be digital and print will just be a hip, niche product.

In a University of Houston study conducted in April 2013, researchers had one group read the New York Times in print for 20 minutes, another group read it online for 20 minutes. The group that read the print edition remembered 4.2 stories. The online group remembered 3.4 stories.

Another 2013 study, published in the journal Psychological Science, showed something similar: Students who took notes with pen and paper comprehended lessons better than those who typed them on a keyboard. I happen to believe this. I don’t really have any scientific data to back up my claim, only personal experience. I write a lot of things out longhand first.

Netropolitan

Have you ever been surfing and scrolling down Facebook and wondered, Is there a social network that isn’t free, one I can pay a lot of money to belong to? Let me introduce you to Netropolitan, “the online country club for people with more money than time.” (their slogan, not mine). It costs $9,000 to join, but then drops to $3,000 a year to maintain the membership.

Basically, it’s Facebook for people with a lot of money. Sort of like Facebook for the people who started Facebook.

Alex Trebek’s Mustache Is Back (and Better Than Ever)!

The new season of Jeopardy! started this week, and there was a surprise for fans: Alex Trebek grew back his mustache! He shaved it off in 2001 but now it’s back, and you get a say in whether he keeps it or not. The show is asking viewers to vote. If fans like it, the mustache will stay. If not, he’ll get rid of it.

If he has to get rid of it, maybe he can shave it off during Sweeps Week while the Final Jeopardy theme music plays.

Now, you’re probably asking: is there a way I can be kept up-to-date with what’s going on with Alex’s mustache? Of course there is: It’s on Twitter!

Upcoming Anniversaries

September 21
High Fantasy (1937): J.R.R. Tolkien publishes his classic fantasy story The Hobbit about Bilbo Baggins’ journey with a band of treasure-hungry dwarfs. The story and its follow-up, Tolkien’s epic novel, The Lord of the Rings, went on to become an international craze in the 1960s. The Hobbit is currently being released as a film trilogy.

September 22
Emancipation (1862): Abraham Lincoln issues his initial emancipation proclamation, ordering the emancipation of all slaves in the Confederacy. His proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1863, but could only be enforced as Union forces reclaimed Southern territory.

September 23
American Explorers (1806): After two years and four months, Lewis and Clark return from their expedition, arriving in St. Louis. Their expedition made it all the way to the Pacific Ocean in modern-day Oregon and paved the way for settlement of the Western United States.

September 24
Civil Rights (1957): Following Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus’ attempts to restrict desegregation in Little Rock, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sends the historic 101st Airborne Division to enforce federal law. The next year, Governor Faubus responded by closing all four public high schools in Little Rock.

September 25
Play Ball (1911): Construction begins on Fenway Park in Boston. The oldest major league ballpark in active use, Fenway has been home to the Boston Red Sox for more than 100 years. Take a look at “Rain Delay”, a moving story about a frustrating father-and-son trip to see the Red Sox play at Fenway.

September 27
Auto Pioneer (1908): The Piquette Plant in Detroit begins production of the Ford Model T. Over the next 15 years, Henry Ford’s Detroit plants would crank out 15 million more Model Ts, making it the bestselling car of its time. Ford also famously doubled his workers’ wages, prompting a shift in the industry toward higher pay.

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/09/19/post-week-in-review/post-week-in-review-september-14-september-20.html/feed0Are We Losing the Stars?http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/08/29/in-the-magazine/people-and-places/light-pollution.html
Fri, 29 Aug 2014 13:00:10 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=100632An astronomer draws attention to the rising threat of light pollution with the help of the U.S. National Park Service and brilliant night-sky photography

Lights out: A starry evening at Acadia National Park on Mt. Desert Island, Maine. Many visit by day; few see its full glory at night, notes astronomer Tyler Nordgren. (Tyler Nordgren)

“If you see a car along that road,” Tyler Nordgren warned me, “don’t look at the headlights. It’ll ruin your night vision for two hours.” Nordgren and I had pitched our tents under the brow of Mount Whitney in the Alabama Hills, a field of boulders near Death Valley. We watched it get dark, and in the nighttime horizon, the sky was perforated by stars and streaked by the Milky Way. Or, to put it in approximate scientific terms, it was probably a class 3 on the Bortle Dark-Sky Scale, the 9-level numeric metric of night sky brightness.

Even so, we could still see domes of hazy light from 200-odd miles south in Los Angeles and 250 miles east in Las Vegas. That encroaching urban glow was like highlighter calling attention to the issue that Nordgren, a prophet whose cause is light pollution, wanted to illustrate for me.

“We’re losing the stars,” the 45-year-old astronomer said. “Think about it this way: For 4.5 billion years, Earth has been a planet with a day and a night. Since the electric light bulb was invented, we’ve progressively lit up the night, and have gotten rid of it. Now 99 percent of the [continental U.S.] population lives under skies filled with light pollution.”

Nordgren is an affable, engaging, and quotable Cassandra, an enthusiastic and patient teacher who loves his subject and wants you to love it, too. Those attributes, along with his book for a lay audience, Stars Above, Earth Below: A Guide to Astronomy in the National Parks, have pushed him to center stage of a small but impassioned movement to preserve natural night skies. When he is not lecturing at the University of Redlands, a California liberal arts college, Nordgren is a much sought-after itinerant preacher intent on bringing people revelation of the stars they have, almost everywhere, lost sight of.

Almost the entire eastern half of the United States, the West Coast, and almost every place with an airport large enough to receive commercial jets are too lit up to get a good view of stars. The phenomenon is illustrated by the first World Atlas of artificial night sky brightness. Based on spacecraft images of Earth in 1996-97, it shows a spectrum from black, representing the natural night sky, to pink, in which artificial light effectively erases any view of the stars at all. Green is where you lose visibility of the Milky Way. The map of the contiguous 48 states — and much of Europe — looks like a video-game screen showing a carpet bombing, the map a splash of green, yellow, red, and pink.

For roughly the past two decades, at least two-thirds of the U.S. population have not been able to see the Milky Way at all, and it will get worse before it gets better. …

For more beautiful night-sky photography and to find out how astronomer Tyler Nordgren is raising awareness of our disappearing stars, pick up the September/October 2014 issue of The Saturday Evening Post on newsstands or …

Purchase the digital edition for your iPad, Nook, or Android tablet:

To purchase a subscription to the print edition of The Saturday Evening Post:

]]>Curing the Clutter Epidemichttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2010/07/26/health-and-family/home-decorating/curing-clutter-epidemic.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2010/07/26/health-and-family/home-decorating/curing-clutter-epidemic.html#commentsMon, 26 Jul 2010 14:29:15 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=25435Why Americans have so much stuff, and how we can learn to hold on to what really matters.

]]>We live in a world of things, of junk, of stuff. This fact was brought home to me—literally—when I left my job after 17 years. I carted the contents of my office home in three garbage bags that sat around the house for the next six months. Every time I tried to sort through those bags and commit to getting rid of any of it, I became paralyzed by fear (Would I need this later? Would I miss that once it was gone?) and overwhelmed by the task at hand. And that was just three bags—most of it paper! How would I ever sort through all the other stuff cluttering up my home and my life?

It’s a question many Americans ask themselves every day. Thanks to an abundance of cheap goods, instant credit, and constant exposure to the persuasive powers of advertising, acquiring has in itself become a national pastime. And a national problem, as our closets, attics, and lives become overwhelmed in an epidemic of uncontrolled clutter.

“We’ve begun to buy and hold on to so many items that we’re now having to acquire more and more space to accommodate our clutter,” says Dr. David Kantra, a psychologist in Fairhope, Alabama who studies the clutter problem.

Birth of an Obsession

Paper Chase
One of the biggest sources of clutter in our lives is paper—bills, receipts, or the instruction manuals from all the stuff we’ve bought.

Here’s how to tame it:
• Gather supplies. You’ll need a recycling bin, garbage bags, file folders, a pen, and a shredder.
• Establish a sorting area. Set up a folding table or quadrant of the floor—you’ll need room to spread out.
• Ditch the obvious. Long-expired coupons or instructions for products you no longer have can lurk in a desk for years. Pitch ’em.
• Create four paper management systems for:1. Action items—bills, timely paperwork2. Essential paperwork not needed on a daily basis, such as bank or insurance statements3. Vital records—birth certificates, Social Security information, various account numbers 4. Archives for tax returns, legal papers, and/or family memorabilia
• Maintain the system by scheduling time to file papers. Organization is an ongoing process.

The ready availability of merchandise of every stripe was something that didn’t exist throughout most of American history, but the problem of clutter traces its origins back further than you might think—all the way to the 19th century. The rise of industrialization and the mass production of products created a cult of desire that has survived the decades, through economic booms and busts, where accumulating goods was viewed as the road to happiness.

That idea became more pronounced in the 20th century, as the power of advertising linked products to a lifestyle. “The message became ‘you are what you own,’ ” says Dr. Lorrin Koran, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Stanford University Center. Retailers responded to that insatiable desire for ownership. Remember the general store? It used to stock about 1,000 items in three or four aisles with one lane for checkout: That was all we needed. Today, you could fit almost the entire contents of that old store into one aisle of a huge discount chain that sells everything from hamburger meat to motor oil to flat-screen TVs. The average super retail center carries more than 100,000 products in mega-stores that stretch the equivalent of nearly five football fields. Shopping malls have become veritable mini cities containing hundreds of stores, food courts, ice skating rinks, movie theaters, even hotels.

And there’s always the Internet. Last year, online shoppers spent $204 billion on merchandise: The auction site eBay alone reported sales of $59.7 billion on merchandise ranging from brand-new cars and homes to vintage collectibles and antiques.

Retailers aren’t the only ones who have catered to this acquisitional trend; the housing industry has, too. In the past 30 years, the size of the average American home has grown 53 percent, from 1,500 square feet to a little more than 2,300 square feet. That’s an extra 800 square feet for stuff. But instead of becoming more organized with this space, homeowners have filled it up, rather than outsource to storage facilities.

“We’re at a point where people don’t know how to make decisions about quantities of things and whether items serve a purpose,” says Laura Leist, president of the 4,200-member National Association of Professional Organizers and the voice of a service industry that has sprung up to help people clear the chaos from their homes. They aren’t the only ones: More than 20 states have chapters of Clutterers Anonymous for clutterers in crisis.

Back to Basics

I wasn’t ready for a 12-step program yet, but it was clear I needed some help. So I consulted a local professional organizer, who helped me sort through my junk and discard what no longer had value. One of the first rules many organizers instill in chronic clutterers is: make the time. Just as someone trying to lose weight needs to set aside time for exercise, someone trying to shed stuff needs to commit to at least 30 to 60 minutes a week sorting through closets, files, and storage areas. Mark the time on your calendar and treat it as a standing appointment.

I learned other tips to help whittle away the clutter in my house and control what I brought in so that new junk wasn’t replacing the old.

I’m still working on the rest of the house, but I eventually got rid of that stuff I’d brought home from the office. Now, the only garbage bags on my floor are the ones that are on their way to the trash.

Cash for Clutter

What better way to rid your home of excess stuff than turning it into cash? But before you advertise your yard or garage sale, you need a strategy that maximizes your profits and puts the biggest dent in your clutter, says Barry Izsak, a professional organizer and author of Organize Your Garage in No Time.

Here’s your checklist:

1: A few weeks before the sale, give everyone in your family a box to fill with items they no longer want or use. If you’re not sure what to toss, Izsak offers three ways to decide: “If you don’t love it; it’s not useful; and you haven’t used it in several years, turn it into cash,” he says.

2: Schedule your sale of a Saturday near the first or 15th of the month, when most people get paid.

3: Scrub, wash, or polish your stuff. Make sure toys or electronics have all the pieces attached. Hang clothes on a rack. Use plastic bags to group children’s puzzles or hold hardware nuts and bolts.

4: Put price tags on everything. “People don’t want to ask you how much stuff is,” says Izsak. For small items, create a nickel-and-dime box.

5: Display your wares on a table or a board between two saw horses. Don’t make people bend down to look at your stuff.

6: Have an extension cord handy to show that appliances and electrical gadgets work.

7: Be flexible when it comes to price. “If someone picks up something you’re selling, be willing to deal with them right then and drop your price,” says Izsak. “They may be the only person all day who wants that item.”

8: Get rid of what’s left. It’s already out of the house, so keep it that way. Put unsold stuff by the curb, or cart it off for donation as soon as your sale is over.